


Cuts You Up

by jendavis



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-16
Updated: 2011-04-16
Packaged: 2017-10-18 04:01:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/184742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jendavis/pseuds/jendavis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It all started with Ronon's knife, held to his own throat.  (Story written for rustler's awesome bid on the help_japan auction).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cuts You Up

  
The wraith had come back for him, they'd hunted him through the wreckage of his home, made him rip open a thousand old wounds in a hospital that had once been the greatest in the known planets. There'd been nothing left but the fight, and he'd been ready to die.

He hadn't honestly expected to live.

\---

Ronon had been awake for a while when Sheppard showed up in the infirmary, looking worn out and tired, all the adrenaline from the fight long since gone. His voice was low and quiet, but his eyes had been burning.

"Tell me you're not going to pull something like that again."

"I _told_ you to leave the wraith to me," Ronon shook his head. "It wasn't your fight."

"Okay. _One_ , you're on my team. Your fights are mine whether you like it or not. _Two_ , I meant before. The knife." He sighed, leaning against the foot of Ronon's bed. "I know you'd die for us. You've more than _proven_ that, and I get it. But I need to make sure you're not going to _kill_ yourself for us."

"What's the difference?"

"If you want to survive, you're more likely to get the job done than you would if you don't care." He sounded like he was reciting something he'd been told more than once, and was smiling like he knew it. "But really, because you're my friend, and I'm fucking worried."

"Sheppard." He didn't like seeing him like this. He needed to explain. "There weren't any other options."

"I know," Sheppard said. "And I would've done the same thing. Which is why I'm having a hell of a time with it. Because now I know just how _far_ you'll go to keep us safe. And that makes _me_ the guy who'll order you to do it _again_ if the shit hits the fan."

He'd started pacing, down past the foot of Ronon's bed, but it was clear he was gathering his thoughts, finding the words. Ronon didn't interrupt.

"I'd pick you. _First_." Sheppard came to a stop again as his eyes slid away. "Before the others. In a heartbeat. And _that_ is pretty much the shittiest thing I've ever learned about myself."

\---

Ronon hadn't known how to respond.

But he did decide, that if it ever came down to it? He wouldn't give Sheppard the chance to make it an order.

And maybe that was what Heightmeyer was waiting to hear. Maybe she already knew, and had brought him in here to trick him into admitting it.

"Your team is worried about you, Ronon," she finally said, about half an hour in. "Holding a knife to your own throat, as Colonel Sheppard indicated-"

"I did what I had to do to get them _out_ of there," he sighed, wanting to get this over with as quickly as possible. "I've already been over this," he tried. "With Weir, and Sheppard."

"That's good," Heightmeyer smiled. "Talking about it is healthy. But unfortunately, that's not enough to get you out of this."

"So what do you want to talk about?"

"I've read all the reports. What stands out immediately is not that you went your own way during the mission, which we'll discuss later, but that you offered to sacrifice yourself when your team was threatened."

"It got them out," Ronon explained, for what must have been the tenth time this week.

"I'm not arguing that, or honestly, even criticizing that. It was brave, what you did. The real reason we're here," she admitted apologetically, "is that there may be reason for concern, depending on _why_."

Ronon feigned ignorance, as if he hadn't already heard it from Sheppard. "What do you mean?"

"Why did you hold a knife to your throat in order to save your team?"

"Because that was the only way to get them out of there," Ronon sighed, exasperated. He really wanted to yell, ask Heightmeyer why people from her planet had such a vague notion of what that meant, ask her why they were all so afraid of death that even accepting it as a possibility was taboo, but she was shaking her head, apparently sensing his thoughts.

"One question. When you were running, did you ever come across other people?"

"Sometimes," Ronon frowned, surprised by the question. "Tried not to, it would just bring the wraith on their heads."

"But those times that you weren't able to avoid them, and the wraith came anyway, did you stop running?"

Ronon took a breath. They'd never talked about that before, he wasn't sure how she'd even _known_.

Even when he'd wanted to, when he'd been tired, alone, sick and half-mad, when he'd just wanted all of it to stop, he'd never slowed down. Even knowing that bodies were falling to the wraith in his wake, he never stopped running. And most of the time, he managed not to think about it.

"No," he answered at length, avoiding Heightmeyer's gaze, not ready to see the disappointment there.

She said nothing for a long time, it was her favorite way of making people so uncomfortable that they started spilling everything. It was times like this that Ronon remembered that while she wasn't a soldier, it was only because her weapons were words.

He was fairly good at remaining silent, but they were going to be here forever, at this rate, so when he rolled his eyes to look at her again, he was surprised to find her smiling. It wasn't what he'd been expecting.

" _What_?" He finally asked, not bothering to hide the exasperation.

"People don't do what you did for strangers who mean nothing. But they'll fight like hell for their families. For the people they love."

\---

Most of the time, Ronon was good at ignoring the things Doctor Heightmeyer told him. Most of the time, whenever he got dragged in for his annual evaluation, she wasn't telling him anything he didn't already know.

It had been three months since his appointment, though, and already it was feeling like an old scar. There, easily forgotten until Ronon brushed a hand over it to find, to his surprise, that it was there, still built into his skin, still there. The scar on his back, where the wraith had sealed their claim on him, was the worst of them. It had defined him for years.

But then McKay grabbed him in the corridor, and made it disappear. Created this blank space that Ronon could fill with something new. Like the tracker scar, though, it seemed that once again, he had little say in the matter.

\---

There were a thousand different things working themselves into his skin. John's promise to fight him to the death when they were stuck on a ship that was starting to lose orbit. The sudden thrill of mad hope that rushed through him when John asked him if he was seeing anyone, and the panic that had set in, pushing words out of his mouth because he didn't know what the right answer was, and-

When Carson died, it had felt like a punishment for hoping so much. The entire city ached with the loss.

And then they'd lost Elizabeth, and the entire city had cracked, and they kept it going, but their home had been splintered.

And then it was Tyre, and Ara and Rakai, and had felt _right_ to be fighting with them again. But they were already gone, they'd already been lost before he'd found them. And nothing had been said, but even after he'd gotten his painting back from McKay, and despite Teyla's assurances, he was starting to wonder if he'd lost John, too.

\---

"Painting's crooked," John gestured at the wall with the six-pack he was holding.

Ronon had been sitting on his bed, staring at it for a while now, maybe an hour, and it hadn't occurred to him. He'd been thinking about the battle at Vetariss, about arguing with Tyre and Rakai in the barracks about Huld's tactics, or whether Rakai could take him in a fight.

The battle had been fought and won a over century before Ronon had ever been born, but it had made the world he'd lived in. They'd united the warring states, and Huld had gone on to draft the Charter. It had been the first time, possibly in the galaxy, that anyone had differentiated between human and wraith with regards to enemy combatants and the treatment of prisoners. In doing so, it had defined what it meant to be human.

It was history. It was _his_ history. But John was sitting on the floor next to him, alive and probably about to make an awkward attempt at talking, and suddenly?

The painting was just a painting.

"So tell me about it," John said, nodding at the painting again and passing him a beer.

"Does it matter?"

"Doesn't have to. 'Less you'd rather talk about something else." When John shrugged, his shoulder brushed Ronon's leg- the sensation was startling. It was easier to join him on the floor than it was to answer his questioning glance, and easier to tell him what he remembered from school- they were just stories now, just his _past_ \- than anything else.

\---

John had asked questions, here and there, but it was clear that he'd been on the verge of asking more.

"What's with you, anyway?" Ronon said, after trying to explain the differences of the three main factions during the Reconciliation Wars. He hadn't thought about them in years, before tonight.

"What do you mean?"

Ronon shrugged. "You're really that interested in Satedan history?"

"Never heard much about it, before. Besides, I'm interested in you, so why wouldn't I-" John coughed, cracking open another beer. "So why wouldn't I be interested in that?" He nodded at the painting again, where his eyes had been trained for most of the conversation, but the was a flush crawling up the side of his neck that looked more red than the painted sky.

Ronon tried to let it slide, he tried so hard that it wasn't until John sighed a few minutes later that he realized they'd fallen into silence.

It didn't feel silent, there was blood thrumming through his veins and he could hear every footstep two corridors away, outside, he could hear the wind whipping around the tower. He couldn't hear John breathing, though.

"John," he said, mostly to just inject a deliberate sound into the room.

"Look, Ronon, I didn't-"

"What?" Ronon bit his tongue, he'd spoken too soon, he'd cut John off and now-

"What I mean is, when I said I was. You know." John was staring at the painting now, _hard_. "It's. Don't worry about it, okay?"

Ronon drew a breath, nodded, and felt John beginning to relax next to him. The next moment that came would push this one further back out of existence, and this wasn't a battle, this wasn't Vetariss. It wouldn't be talked about in schools or argued about in books. It would never be talked of again.

"John." Ronon waited, watched until he turned to face him. "You're telling me not to worry about it, just means you're telling me there's an _it_ to worry about." He'd never seen himself in the mirror in Heightmeyer's office, but he knew what it felt to pull the face that John was wearing, knew the frustration that hearing one's own words could bring. He hurried to get his thoughts in order. "I'm not worried, though."

"You're not?" And it wasn't a confirmation, the words didn't mean anything, it was the _tone_ that mattered, relief and hope and adrenaline all at once.

"Not anymore."

"You're saying _anymore_ ," John shifted, just a little bit, closer, and the corners of his moth were tight. He was trying not to smile. "Just means that you _had_ been worried about it previously."

"For a while now," Ronon admitted, surprised at how easily the words came, now.

"Cool," John set his beer carefully aside letting go enough to grin. "Me too."

"So, ah," Ronon tried not to get distracted. "Do we need to talk about this?"

"To be honest, I don't think we've actually started, but," John's hand was wrapping around his shoulder, and Ronon was surprised to find that he was already twisting to meet him, that somehow, he was still alive through all this, that alarms weren't suddenly blaring deep in the city as their mouths met.

As if John was noticing the same thing, he huffed a laugh before deepening the kiss, swinging closer into Ronon, kneeling over his legs, pressing him back against the bed. The stubble on John's chin was just barely there, his calloused hand dragging more roughly against the skin at Ronon's collar.

This was really happening, Ronon realized, one hand splayed over John's spine, the other holding his leg steady. John's muscles were shifting underneath his hands, John's fingers were stroking the skin at his throat, coming up to brush along his jaw, then back again.

His hand was still there when John raised his head to breathe. Trailing his mouth down along the edge of John's collar, the cotton soft and warm, the pulse racing underneath it all, Ronon asked, "what's with you and my neck?"

John shook his head. "Nothing," he said, his thumb tracing a gentle slash against his throat as he leaned in to kiss him again. "We're good."

  



End file.
